The Cyberkink Sideshow (3 page)

Why had Pikesley had to send
her
on this one? Why not one of the others? Just because they were all married and had children and it would be considered indecent and inappropriate for them to investigate suspicious activity in this sort of environment? Did the people with whom she worked mutter and speculate behind her back? Did they suspect her inadequacy? She’d always feared they did. It was the air they had when December invariably came round, and one of her colleagues would, as always, ask her if she intended to bring anyone as a guest to the office party. She’d only heard fragments of conversations about her. She knew some of them suspected her of being gay and in denial. Others more likely merely suspected her of being some sort of prude with a Victorian attitude to sex, from the way she fell silent whenever conversation descended to bawdy jokes and is-this-normal marital discourse. Perhaps Pikesley had thought it a right fine joke, sending her on this job.

The audience was applauding. Sylvia looked up from Max, who she’d been staring at to try to keep her mind off what the performance had made her think. The nerd and the buxom woman bowed and left the stage. The spotlight returned to the ringmaster.

“As for our next performer, well, he has no name, not that anybody knows. Some say he sought revenge on those who destroyed him and left his body a ruin, that he hunted them down and killed them in cold blood. Some say his injuries were caused by wild animals on the loose in Birmingham. Some say what was done to him gave him sight beyond sight–the sight to see into the very soul of his fellow men...”

The ringmaster paused to reflect, leaning back on his heels and thus pronouncing the curves of his waist and backside. “All we know is he’s a bionic man.” The ringmaster bowed slightly, and gestured with an opulent motion of his arm to the curtain, where a spotlight illuminated a figure who strode at a steady pace toward the stage. Unlike the other actors, he was fully clothed in a formal suit and tie. Where the left arm emerged from the cuff, steel gleamed in place of flesh. The man’s scalp was half covered with an artificial material. Black glossy plastic and harsh metal bulged from his eye sockets.

The main screens changed to show the man’s face. The skin that remained on his head was rutted with scars and the rough irregularities of skin grafts. His nose was missing entirely, replaced with two Teflon slits that closed and opened with each breath. The apparatus protruding from his eye sockets and the rigid mask of the transplanted skin on his face made his appearance utterly inhuman. When he spoke, his voice was a sibilant murmur, dry and harsh as the winds in the desert.

“Come with me, and I shall show you the dark places I see,” he hissed. “The bleak shadow world the human eye does not penetrate.”

The screen changed, to show an eerie green monochrome rendition of ranks of strange people, staring with sinister gleaming eyes. With a start, Sylvia recognized it as what must be the bionic man’s view of the audience.

As he turned to pan his vision over the entire seating area, not one person made a sound. Everyone stared at the creepy image on the screen, and an uncanny worry came over Sylvia that she might recognize herself in this distorted vision. Although it seemed ridiculous to fear such a thing, nevertheless she did, and yet she could not look away.

The bionic man’s vision changed to infrared, the bodies of the audience becoming blobs of bright heat. Then it changed again, to a grainy grayness that showed the shapes of their bodies under their clothes. A murmur of unease spread across everyone.

The screens faded to black, and the bionic man bowed once and wordlessly left the stage. All the lights dimmed.

For a moment, the audience seemed confused. Uneasy conversation broke out. A few began to laugh. The laughter spread, slowly turning into applause.

The main spotlight came back on, focused once more on the ringmaster, who raised his arms to a loud roar of approval. A movement somewhere above him caught Sylvia’s attention. Some sort of equipment was being lowered from the gantries.

“You’ve been a marvelous audience and thank you so much for coming. We’ve been working hard to get our main event up and running, and we should be open for business tomorrow as planned. For now it’s time to bid you farewe–”

His voice cut short as the Hermaphrodite Twins, who had been moving stealthily up behind him, each grabbed an arm and hoisted him up. The microphone landed on the floor, transmitting a muffled thump through the loudspeakers. A thunder of laughter surged through the crowd. One of the twins snatched the ringmaster’s hat and spun it away like a Frisbee with a flick of his wrist. As the two of them stretched his arms up and manacled his wrists to the apparatus overhead, his ruffled, straw-colored hair and the expression of apparently genuine panic on his face made Sylvia start. Was this really only an act? What were they going to do? Sylvia’s pulse quickened as she once more found herself studying the shape of him. She wanted to see him be humiliated, see him helpless and in their power and unable to predict what they intended to do, and her own reaction shocked her. Max stirred uncomfortably at her feet, sensing the change in her mood from the bleedback through her interface to him. He’d been castrated as a puppy and had never felt the sex urge. He didn’t understand. She tried to think, tried to look away, but she couldn’t, and she was riveted on the scene below and what was about to happen.

One of the twins got hold of the ringmaster’s shirt at the back and tore it off him, leaving the startlingly white flesh of his chest and stomach quivering with the sudden motion. An electric charge of excitement jumped up Sylvia’s thighs. The two lifted up his feet and slid his shorts down, over his hiking boots, before tying up his legs by slings under the backs of his knees. A third sling went behind his shoulders and under his elbows.

Now he was suspended facing the ceiling, legs and arms spread wide, fat and naked apart from his woggle and hiking boots and the woolly socks crumpled around his ankles. His stubby, semierect phallus slumped against the mound of his stomach, its base buried in the soft pad of fat covering his groin. Something gleamed with a dull metallic luster on its tip. Sylvia strained her eyes to make it out...some kind of piercing by the look of it.

The twins removed the codpieces from their bondage uniforms while he hung there, his breathing loud and rapid through the ring’s main speakers, a slight whimper apparent with each exhalation. Both twins had sparse, close-cropped pubic hair and very small phalluses. Or they might have been very large clitorises–it was hard to tell where the line between the two might fall.

A twin withdrew something from a pouch at the back of his harness, six inches long and white, with an irregular knobbly shape. It glistened with lube. He knelt between the ringmaster’s chubby thighs and lowered the head of the object toward the dark, tight area under the coarse skin of his scrotum.

The ringmaster’s whimpering rose to become loud cries as the object sank into him. The screen displaying the close-up shot showed the twin was wiggling it with a rolling circular motion as he pushed it deeper. The second twin stepped forward to straddle the ringmaster’s face and began to fondle the man’s chest and biceps. His noises became muffled and mingled with slurps and sucking sounds as he wrapped his lips around the twin’s glans.

His body began to tremble, rattling the harness. Sylvia stared, mesmerized by the quivering and rippling spreading over him. Semen was ebbing from the tip of his dick, lots of it. It pooled in the space between his groin and thigh and dripped to the sandy floor in a thick string, and yet it continued to spill from him and still he continued to shiver and convulse and cry out in orgasm.

When he finally stopped, he hung there replete while the Hermaphrodite Twins pulled the dildo out of him and unstrung him from the harness. He bowed low to the applause of the crowd. The Hermaphrodite Twins bowed in turn, and with a last hail of, “Thank you!” from the ringmaster, the three of them left through the curtains.

Sylvia looked about herself, at people who gathered their things and expressed regret that it was over, as though this was a perfectly normal and very enjoyable evening event. All she could do was stare at the fat man’s jiggling buttocks as he exited the ring. What had just happened made her feel so many conflicting things she couldn’t separate them from the confusion. Why couldn’t she treat it the same way she handled the football matches? Sylvia didn’t even like sex. Sure, she liked men and she liked being intimate, but whenever she’d got to the point of penetration with anyone, it had hurt, and she’d lost her libido immediately. That she felt something when she watched this made it even worse. It was like being poor and watching rich people flaunt their money.

The crowd was rising from their seats, heading for the exits now. Sylvia needed to get after the performers and have a look backstage. She pushed down against the current of exiting spectators, toward the center ring. When she reached the barrier, she hoisted Max up by his harness and lowered him over, before climbing down after him.

She knew Max would pull toward that damp pungent patch on the sand where the ringmaster’s orgasm had spilled over, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. She pulled him on, trying to block the smell and the data shot that came with it.

“Excuse me!” she called through the curtain, and Max poked his nose through the gap in the center. Inside, the performers all seemed to have provided themselves a modicum of decency by throwing on some clothes. Sylvia immediately recognized the ringmaster, clad in a vermilion silk dressing gown. The fabric rippled, clinging to him as he strode toward her, and she thought again of how shameful and ridiculous, and yet how oddly compelling, his act a moment ago had been. She’d never been with a fat guy before. Perhaps it would be different than with other men, or perhaps it would just be another disappointment and a dead end. A curiosity came over her: how might he feel to touch? Soft and smooth, rather than the stringy muscle and rough hairy skin of the other men she’d known.

“Would you mind if I had a moment?” She could already tell from Max’s feedback that the room was clean. It was too small and clear of interfering smells for him not to have detected something by now. “Who’s in charge here?”

The ringmaster twisted his mouth and raised his eyebrows. “That would be me.”

He hadn’t introduced himself. Sylvia really ought to get his name, but a fear nagged at her that he would have some ludicrous porn name that he’d had made official by deed poll, and she could just see Pikesley’s face if she handed in a report with such a name on it. “I’m Constable Sylvia Price.” Sylvia showed him her ID. “I need to inform you that my department has received a number of...suggestions...from members of the public regarding trade or activities involving banned or controlled substances and devices within the locality of this attraction. I’m here to establish whether there’s any truth to these assertions.”

“Did you know,” he said in a whimsical sort of way, “that dolphins are the only animal known to have nasal sex? And that there are more gay giraffes than there are straight ones?”

His voice was almost flirtatious, and he was talking to
her
, and it was like she was back in school and trying to break the ice for the first time with the object of a crush. Sylvia could feel the heat building in her face. She glanced away from him for a moment, breaking eye contact. Not a good impression to make.

“Just consider that, next time someone tells you that our sideshow violates the laws of nature.”

Leaning on Max’s more robust mental state, she faced the ringmaster again. “You need to understand that these allegations are serious. If we find evidence of drugs, or illicit software, being traded or used in this facility, the police have the power to shut down this operation.”

“Which would be very
convenient
, for certain people.” He wasn’t flirtatious now. A forceful tone had come into his voice. “You think it’s acceptable to harry us about, on the accusations of people without even the decency to give their names?”

“Of course not. Nobody is accusing you or your employees of anything. I certainly hope I’ll find nothing of the sort, but complaints have been made, and they need to be investigated. It’s in your interests if you co-operate with us. I need to ask you if there is anything you want to tell me that you think is of relevance.”

The ringmaster folded his arms and raised his chin imperiously. “No, there isn’t.”

“Okay, then. Thank you for your time. If you don’t mind, I’d like to leave you my contact details in case something does occur to you.” Sylvia offered him a card with her details.

The ringmaster snapped his fingers and the conjuror stepped up to stand beside him. “Give the lady my card.”

With a flourish and a swish of his robe, the conjuror bowed before Sylvia and produced, or appeared to produce, a business card from his backside. Sylvia took it gingerly between finger and thumb when he presented it to her.

“Oh don’t be ridiculous!” he said. “You don’t honestly think it’s actually been up my arse? It’s just a sleight of hand!” The conjuror stalked away in disgust.

The card simply said:

Victor R. Maynard

Freak

Followed by a mobile number.

“You’re Maynard?”

The ringmaster reached to Sylvia’s breast pocket and took her pen. “Victor R. Maynard,” he muttered, as he scrawled on the card before handing back both it and the pen. “That may be worth something on eBay in a hundred years’ time. If eBay still exists in a hundred years.”